This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.> they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means
I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.
TZubiri|1 month ago
A relatively recent new interpretation:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/69208/new-resea...
>Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia.
But these cultures and texts are much closer to us than the Chinese Tao te Ching.
Taxonomically Latin and English have a common ancestor in ProtoIndoeuropean sure, but English and the Romances (I'm spanish native), but there's a lot of horizontal influence of Latin in English. Netwon, (and many other English writers) wrote in both Latin and English. The aphabet is the same.
Regarding the Epic of Gilgamesh, I haven't read much about that, cuneiform must be insanely hard to read, even through translations, that said, the fact that it seems to be an influence for Noah's Ark story seems to bring it much closer to western culture than Asian culture.
Same thing with Greek literature, it's a bit farther away, but some stuff like ficticious Oddyssey will be somewhat approachable through a translation, the rhymes and a million temporal references will be completely lost obviously.
Even some Arabic math texts I would consider to be somewhat more approachable by virtue of being so foundational to maths in general.
But religious Chinese? must be one of the most unapproachable combos for reading as a non native reader.